JEDEC Awards: Dr. Joo Sun Choi, Samsung Electronics

2020 Distinguished Executive Leadership Award Recipient

The JEDEC Distinguished Executive Leadership Award honors the most distinguished senior executives in the electronics industry who have promoted and supported the advancement of JEDEC standards. These leaders are the true pacesetters of the industry through the companies they build and the teams they lead. Recipients of the JEDEC Distinguished Executive Leadership Award are making the industry better through their long-term support for JEDEC participation at both the strategic and managerial levels of open standards development.

Dr. J. S. Choi is a 25-year veteran of the memory industry and has worked in roles ranging from DRAM design engineering, new product definition and strategic marketing to executive-level management responsibilities for process technology advancement, sales growth and marketing leadership.

An Executive Vice President of Samsung Electronics, Dr. Choi has been President of Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., where he has overseen sales and marketing, product planning and application engineering for Samsung’s industry-leading ecosystem that includes Memory, Foundry, Display, LED and System LSI offerings in the US.

Dr. Choi has been a longtime supporter of JEDEC. Early in his career, he was one of the key developers of the first SDRAM on which all JEDEC-standardized synchronous memory products including DDR are based.

Dr. Choi has also been a vocal driver of TSV-stacking technologies, providing the foundation for high density JEDEC-standardized DDR4 and upcoming DDR5 memory modules, as well as storage class modules incorporating flash technology. Throughout his career, Dr. Choi has supported JEDEC industry-wide standards in lieu of proprietary alternatives.

Before joining Samsung Korea in 2004 as Senior Vice President and GM of DRAM Product & Technology Development, Dr. Choi held numerous DRAM engineering and product design leadership positions within the semiconductor community. His service to the industry has covered DRAM design, product planning, strategic marketing, new product definition, DRAM process technology, flash storage oversight, sales and marketing, and general management.

Dr. Choi received his Masters of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. A perennial scholar, Dr. Choi has published several technical papers and holds numerous patents related to semiconductor memory and system design.